TheaterWorks has announced that “The Lifespan of a Fact” will complete its theater’s 2019-20 season.
The play, by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, is about accuracy in journalism and it will be interesting to see how it plays at a time when the popular political sport is the lambasting of “fake news.” ‘
“The Lifespan of a Fact” will take the second slot on the TheaterWorks season (or third if you count the annual holiday show “Christmas on the Rocks” in there), running Jan. 30 through March 8.
“Lifespan of a Fact” concerns a hotshot writer named John D’Agata who’s delivered a sensational article on a sensitive subject to a staid magazine. D’Agata has a run-in with Jim Fingal, the magazine fact-checker charged with giving his prose the once-over before publication.
D’Agata and Fingal are real people, and the play is based on a book that showed how D’Agata’s article (intended for Harper’s Magazine but ultimately published in the journal The Believer) looked before and after Fingal’s fact check.
When the play premiered last year in New York, it inspired a memorable piece in The New Yorker about how actor Daniel Radcliffe (who was playing Fingal) had visited the magazine to learn about fact checking firsthand.
The rest of the season includes “American Son” Oct. 18 through Nov. 23; “The Cake” April 5 through May 10; “The Who and the What” June 4 through July 12; and the musical “Fun Home” Aug. 7 through Sept. 13, 2020).
The season starts later than usual because TheaterWorks is just returning to its longtime space on Pearl Street after extensive renovations to the performance space led the company to perform half its 2018-19 season at the Wadsworth.
Details of the TheaterWorks season are at theaterworks.org.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.
